It's not a good week for the printed wordfirst, the Encyclopaedia Britannica announced it will be ending a 244-year print publishing run and now we learn that scientists at England's University of Cambridge have devised a way to remove ink itself from the paper it's adorning.

Dubbed a "laser unprinter," the process works by zapping toner with lasers to remove the ink, according to an abstract of the study presented in Proceedings of the Royal Society. Toner ablation, as lead author J.M. Allwood and colleagues call it, involves shooting a range of laser bursts, from "nanosecond pulses" to long-pulsed beams.

Why bother? "Toner-print removal from paper would allow paper to be re-used instead of being recycled, incinerated, or disposed of in landfill .. [which] could significantly reduce the environmental impact of paper production and use," according to the researchers.

Extreme Tech, which reported on the study earlier this week, notes that "[t]he trick here is ablating the toner without damaging the paper; to do this, the team uses green laser light that is readily absorbed by dark toner, but which passes harmlessly through cellulose fibers in paper."

As PCMag's sister site points out, current methods of recycling paper leave a lot to be desired, because the re-pulping process has a hefty environmental impact, even if it's not as resource-intensive as creating new paper.

"If we could simply delete sheets of paper, rather than re-pulping them, we could cut down on electricity usage, CO2 output, and most importantly, fresh water, which is growing more scarce by the year," Extreme Tech notes.

Allwood's team believes unprinting could cut paper recycling carbon emissions at minimum by half and possibly as much as 20 times. Unfortunately the researchers don't think a commercial unprinting device is going to arrive any time soonwe wonder if by the time it does, whether there will any paper left to unprint anyway.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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